


Self-Symmetry

by LookingForDroids



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Do Not Archive (The Magnus Archives), F/F, Probably very mild, Spiral!Sasha, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-12
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:55:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21766471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids
Summary: Lost things have a way of finding themselves in the Spiral.
Relationships: Helen/Sasha James
Comments: 16
Kudos: 43





	Self-Symmetry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).

Helen isn’t a collector — not of trinkets and not of people nor things that used to be people, not like Michael who would keep victims alive for years — but little lost things have a way of finding themselves in the Spiral all the same. Sometimes Helen keeps them. Sometimes she eats them. She doesn’t feel as bad about that as she used to when she was Helen Richardson still.

She’s not going to eat this one, though, even though it’s less of a person than she is. It isn’t much at all except a shadow without a name, scurrying like a mouse along the walls of her corridors. It darts across her mirrors in fragmented reflection, and she follows, watching in fascination, tasting the thin silver trail of its fear. There’s something about it that itches at her mind — a Michael-memory, perhaps, telling her that her quarry once had a name that was more than _nothing_, and the thought of that is —

It’s —

It makes her bones and teeth hurt, thinking about lost mice that used to be different than they are, and she has a lot more bones and teeth than Helen Richardson ever did. She doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like it at all, and this chasing game feels wrong now. She’s bored of it. Better to catch the insubstantial thing between the shards of her fingers, lift it from the mirror’s surface as it writhes and struggles to slip free, and — there. It’s more than smoke now. It has a face, a voice, fingers and toes and hair that curls and evaporates like ethanol fumes because it’s not so easy for a thing without a name to stay in the world.

“But you’re not in the world,” Helen says. “You’re in my house.” Her laughter cracks mirrors and reforms them, and her hands catch coils of escaping nothing and weave it back into a shape that might be almost like the one it used to have, a little sharper and more solid, a little less _it_ and a little more _she._

Only a little, though. Helen is curious, but it isn’t in her nature to make anything too human or too complete.

Still, _she_ doesn’t flinch from the way Helen’s edges twist around themselves, or shudder at the sight of doors and mirrors and doors, just blinks and tilts her head and doesn’t flee. She listens to Helen’s laughter echo down distorted corridors, and the metallic taste of her terror fades; she touches Helen’s hand, runs her finger along the glassy edge, and after a moment she bleeds like a person would, like she’s just remembered how. Her mouth moves around the shape of a letter, the pressed-tight sound of M, and then she shakes her head and says, “No, you’re not, are you?”

“No,” Helen agrees. “I’m not. Who are you?”

“I’m,” she says. “I was. I’m not — ”

The thing she doesn’t say is sibilant, this time; a sound like long grass sighing hangs unspoken in the air. Her voice falters. She lifts her bleeding hand, runs her fingers over the contours of her own face; briefly, wallpaper and brass fixtures are visible through her skin. “I’m not. I think I used to be.”

Helen understands. She knows how to be a creature that was what it is and can’t be any longer. She knows how much it hurts. Lost things find their way to the Spiral, and if it doesn’t eat them then it changes them, and Helen takes Once-Sasha’s face between her hands, touches the seams where her edges don’t meet right, feels the fractal chaos beneath her skin like the statue beneath the stone. She could be beautiful, razor-bright, dissonant. She already is.

“Don’t worry,” Helen says. “I’ll let you stay here. I can make you into something new.”

And Almost-Sasha steps forward, touches Helen’s skin like she’d touched her own. Her fingertips are soft and warm, cold and misty, wet with blood and charged with static. The air is full of the taste of metal, silver and copper, and Helen doesn’t know what she wants, beyond more of this, the fear and the softness both. Michael would have kept his newfound guest for years, the way he did until he stopped being Michael, but this time not to hurt. Helen Richardson would have let her go. Helen lays a hand against her chest, beneath the hollow of her throat, kisses her and feels her kissing back. Time stretches, blurs, coils back upon itself in recursive eddies. No-Longer-Sasha rests a hand over Helen’s own and draws it down, cutting cloth, unseaming skin. What pools beneath isn’t blood, but smoke and memory in a hollowed-out ribcage, and Helen follows it down, tasting it, sinking to her knees on carpet marked by shifting geometries. She peels the shadow of denim from the shadow of skin, baring freckle-patterned thighs and wiry curls, and though this is a labyrinth and Helen the monster at its heart, the sound that her lost traveler makes at the feeling of teeth on skin isn’t pain and isn’t dread. 

Helen looks up, sees her looking down. Her eyes are bright and kaleidoscopic, full of unfolding symmetry, her image reflected and reduplicated in every one of Helen’s mirrors. She isn’t Sasha in the same way that Helen isn’t Helen, and that feels right, because it makes two of them together.

_I could make you mine,_ she thinks, urging the other’s legs apart, leaning forward to do what Helen Richardson remembers how to do and becoming for a moment what Helen Richardson remembers how to be. She tastes clean skin and human musk, feels Sasha’s thighs solid and warm beneath hands that don’t cut. Then that moment breaks like a mirror, and this isn’t Sasha with hands tangled in her twisting hair, and she is only her own knife-edged, hungry self again — but changed, ever changing, and balanced now by another like herself.

_I could be yours. Your doors, your hallways, your home.___


End file.
